Growing up, I lived for a couple of years in Westport, Connecticut. Back then it was still somewhat of a small town, growing quickly and going through the inevitable growing pains.
I was thinking of those growing pains yesterday when I read in the LA Times about a much smaller town in Oregon that is also, obviously, going through the pain of being not all that far from a big-and-growing-bigger metro area.
In those years in Westport, a guy came on the scene that was happy to challenge the still-modest sensibilities of the town. Arnie Kaye was not a modest guy by the standards of the day. He built what was then considered a mansion. He put in a covered swimming pool. He was not concerned with what the neighbors thought when he drove around town in a Rolls Royce. And he had a business idea.
At the time coin-op video games were all the rage. At least, they were all the rage in places where you could find them. In Westport at the time, you were limited to a game of Pac Man, a Galaga machine, and one other that I forget completely, all located at the local Dairy Queen, which is where many of us went after school.
Arnie figured that there was a business in building a well-run video arcade that would be both safe and fun for kids. He bought property on the Post Road and started planning.
He and his business became the focal point for those people who didn't want Westport to change. In retrospect the "Arnie's Place" controversy probably had a lot less to do with kids playing video games and hanging out after dark than the opposition claimed, and everything to do with Arnie and the change he represented. His opposition managed to hold things up for months because there was some sort of permitting that he needed for a video arcade and attached deli that the town could delay.
Eventually Arnie even made a threat. If he couldn't develop the property as he saw fit within the town's zoning laws, then he would make an alternate use of it that didn't require any special permitting. He would open an X-rated movie theater and offer free admission to members of the Hells Angels and other motorcycle gangs.
It was almost certainly a bluff. But it got the city government took a long hard look at the situation. And they very wisely decided that if change was going to happen, maybe a well-run video arcade wasn't the worst change you could have.
In the years that Arnie's Place operated, before home-gaming made the whole concept obsolete, I don't think there was ever a single incident. It was well run, safe, enforced curfews for younger kids, didn't tolerate alcohol and in the end was a much better place to hang out than the Dairy Queen ever was. Eventually the property was transformed into Arnie's Deli, another great addition to the town. Not sure what it is today.
And by the Hedge Fund Manager standards prevalent in Fairfield County today, Arnie Kaye turns out to have been a pretty modest and low-key guy.
The people of Westport looked change in the face back in the early 80s, and decided they'd better work with it, rather than insist that they could stop the world and end up with the porn-theater alternative. The people of Oceanside, Oregon recently made the other decision. For their efforts they got a strip club in the middle of town.
Something to consider next time somebody tells you they want to stop the world in its tracks.
-btc
